Month

November 2016

Neural networks are machines and algorithms developed to behave like the human brain—but a development from Google Translate shows that (once again) AI can outperform humans in a big way. Google’s AI can now translate language pairs it has not been trained for. To be clear, this means that it can translate between languages that it wasn’t taught to translate. This works if the AI first translates both of the languages into a common language that it knows…

Every big company was a lean and mean startup at one time. Now, confronted with digital disruption all around us, we’re all rushing to rekindle the entrepreneurial flame that first put our businesses on the map.

Every company wants to be “innovative,” but “innovation” has become an overused buzzword that has lost its meaning. Executives at companies of all sizes toss the word around as if they’re doing it. They point to experiments that range from departmental contests and monetary awards to innovation fairs, idea boxes and time to dream big. Executives at one company even dressed up as innovation superheroes in an “intervention” to rally employees around innovation…

The silicon transistor continues to be at the heart of post-PC era products like the smartphone, the tablet and the smartwatch. However, the success metrics for the transistor are quite different now than they have been in the past.Frequency (clock-speed) was the primary metric in the PC era and the standalone central processing unit (CPU) was the primary chip that drove advancements in semiconductor technology for decades. Form-factor was hardly an influencer and there wasn’t as much of a drive to integrate system-level functionality either on-chip (SoC) or in-package (SiP)…

Technology makes us curious, and the smartphone revolution has taken technological innovation to dizzying heights. Things like gesture interface, which we had all glimpsed in the Tom Cruise film Minority Report seemed far-fetched and fictional at that time (2002). It is a reality in mobile technology today, and by 2019, will be available to the masses. Mobile technology is not just changing the way we live and experience, but also defining it. Let us look at six mobile technologies that will become widely present and used in 2017…

A few months ago, someone in my Facebook news feed shared an article with a title along the lines of, “You won’t believe what scientists are doing with CRISPR.” My first thought was, “What is CRISPR?”

After a bit of research, I realized just how difficult it is to get up to speed on subjects outside my area of expertise (software and startups). What are the best introductory explainers — print, video, and audio? Who are the most important thought leaders, operators, or researchers? After 30+ hours of research, I’ve learned so much, but I also wasted a lot of time filtering out low-quality derivative content…

In a presentation titled “Biohacking and the Connected Body” at the Singularity University Global Summit, Hannes Sjoblad, co-founder of the Sweden-based biohacker networkBionyfiken, stated that we likely encounter ‘cyborgs’ on a daily basis without knowing it.

The modern cyborgs we see today include pacemakers, smart insulin monitors, bionic eyes, and robotic arms and legs. These ‘biohacks’ are helping people with disabilities get more from life than ever before. Sjoblad notes this biohacking is utterly reshaping our world, and it will continue to do so. He explains, “we live in a time where, thanks to technology, we can make the deaf hear, the blind see, and the lame walk….

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to die.” — Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Artificial intelligence has fascinated mankind for more than half a century, with the first public mention of computer intelligence recorded during a London lecture by Alan Turing in 1947. More recently, the public has been exposed to headlines that have increasingly contained references to the growing power of AI, whether that’s been AlphaGo’s defeat of legendary Go player Lee Se-dol, Microsoft’s racist AI bot named Tay or any other number of new developments in the machine learning field. Once a plot device for science-fiction tales, AI is becoming real — and human beings are going to have to define their relationship with it sooner rather than later.

Say you’ve inherited a rare genetic mutation that guarantees you’ll get a certain form of cancer by the time you reach 50 years of age.

And that this is most likely how you are going to die. But what if I told you this cancer gene, passed down from generation to generation, can be snipped out of your genome entirely and you never pass it on to any of your offspring?

That is the promise of CRISPR, which not only has the potential to radically change the genetic code of all of humanity but could also fundamentally affect our health care, food system, farming and even the manufacturing and production industries…